Digitization: JSTOR is “Finding the Key to Keywords” in Israel

Preserving scholarship, digitizing Hebrew text and dramatically increasing access to archived scholarly materials written in Hebrew. Those are all likely outcomes following the National Library of Israel (NLI) and University of Haifa Library’s (UHL) recent entry into a contract with the popular online library for academic journals, JSTOR (short for Journal Storage).

For JSTOR, however, the project signals an additional opportunity. Establishing a process for displaying content written in languages that use non- Latin character sets will facilitate JSTOR’s mission to disseminate high-quality scholarship produced worldwide. The organization has enlisted a digitization service provider, Apex CoVantage, which has assembled an international team tasked with developing digitization software that will meet JSTOR’s standards and support its collaboration with the Israeli libraries (dubbed the Hebrew Journals Project).

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The Hebrew Journals Project is funded primarily by the planning and budgeting committee of the Council for Higher Education in Israel. The cost is estimated at $2.2 million.

NLI and UHL first contacted JSTOR in 2008.

“We sought an experienced international partner that would provide a sustainable future for the Hebrew journals project and a wide distribution network to make the journals available for millions of users,” says Oren Weinberg, director of the NLI.

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This fall, Apex will produce several thousand pages of digitized content. In the interim, the principal objective is to choreograph communications and isolate recurring errors in the digitization process.

JSTOR will conduct a final analysis of all digitized materials to ensure that each data batch meets its stated requirements.

Gary Price (gprice@mediasourceinc.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. Before launching INFOdocket, Price and Shirl Kennedy were the founders and senior editors at ResourceShelf and DocuTicker for 10 years. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com, and is currently a contributing editor at Search Engine Land.